Research with CSOs for Sustainable Development :Reflecting on experience

Introduction to workshop

Les Levidow

Workshop aims

• To compare participants’ experiences of doing research with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) relevant to sustainable development.

• To evaluate strengths and weaknesses of those experiences, as a basis to draw lessons for future efforts.

• To clarify how such cooperation benefits research and the wider society.

• To analyse how such research helps to open up issues of sustainable development to civil society perspectives.

• To bring together material for publication in a journal special issue (Action Research)

Research with CSOs

• SiS programme has promoted such research via calls for projects which enhance capacity-building among CSOs and then carry out cooperative research with them.

• Cooperative Research refers back to a GoverScience workshop, whose report elaborated the concept. CR means:

• ‘constant attention to transdisciplinary engagement with stakeholders and public constituencies in order to explore the driving aims and purposes, the alternative orientations, and the wider social and environmental implications of research and innovation’.

• that research incorporate many different kinds of knowledge – formal and informal, codified and tacit, expert and lay and so on.

• that we value tensions and challenges involved in bringing together diverse knowledges, as well as the potential for integration (Stirling, 2006).

Workshop results

DG Research 2009 workshop on CSO involvement in research noted the following:

• CSOs seek more active engagement to define research questions, rather than just being recipients of research results

• Joint projects between CSOs and Research Organisations require investment from both sides in order to understand each other’s context, jargon and culture.

• Co-operative research encourages partnerships between researchers and non-researchers on issues of common interest. These processes entail mutual learning.

Those categories imply fixed roles, but the distinction between

non/researcher can be fluid. CSOs often carry out research, albeit not formally recognised as

such. They can become research organisations.

Overlaps: conceptual & practical• CR overlaps with other concepts – such as participatory

research, partnership research and action research – which likewise describe collaborative processes between researchers and non-researchers.

• Action Research: a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview… It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people… (Reason and Bradbury 2001)

• Partnership Research: Service users are meant to become empowered. But power relationships may be obscured by terms such as ‘community’ and ‘users’. These difficulties should be seen as dilemmas arising from ‘the political nature of the drive for greater service user involvement in research’ (Frankham, 2009).

Transdisciplinary research

• Research design attempts to integrate different disciplines and involve broader stakeholders, thus including the knowledge of those who may have a stake in design and applications of the research.

• Expert knowledge is complemented by the knowledge and experience of potential users.

• Wider involvement is meant to design research so that it becomes more widely accountable.

• But this can mean conflicting criteria among stakeholders. Different stakeholders have divergent views about what is the problem at stake and how it should be solved (Maasen and Lieven, 2006).

Workshop Qs

• How does CSO involvement (re)frame issues and questions for research?

• What new relations arise between researchers and non-researchers?

• How do they engage in mutual learning? • How do they jointly generate new knowledge?• How does research become more accountable?

E.g. by opening up issues of sustainable development to civil society perspectives?

• What dilemmas and difficulties arise? • What can be learned for future efforts?